Stanley Park

Rating:
Summary: Haute cuisine at the final frontier
Review: This novel features Jeremy Papier, a chef struggling with major financial problems, his father, "the Professor," an anthropologist writing about the schizophrenic of Vancouver's Stanley Park and showing signs of becoming one himself, and Dante Beale, a British Columbian counterpart to Howard Schultz who owns an espresso coffee chain tellingly called "Inferno." Dante, a former neighbor of Professor Papier and his son, admires Jeremy's skill tremendously and would like to open a restaurant with him. But he can't resist his own unbounded faith in his corporate resesearch, to the point of telling Jeremy what color food to cook, or his tendency to micromanage. Several other characters, most closely involved with Jeremy, and the Professor's research on the death of two children decades before complete the story nicely. More than the sum of its parts, like any fine meal.